Newly arrived at Fortress Monroe, on May 23, 1861, Butler was confronted by the arrival of three fugitive slaves from the Confederate defensive works project across Hampton Roads. Faced with the looming prospect of being shipped to North Carolina to work on fortifications, Goodheart writes “the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.”

As Civil War Emancipation has chronicled, they were not the first slaves to seek sanctuary in a Union military post. Soon after Lincoln’s inauguration in early March, slaves in separate incidents had presented themselves at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida. Consistent with the Fugitive Slave Act the slaves in both instances had been rebuffed and turned over to local authorities. The post commanders at Sumter and Pickens took this action on their own initiative and it was accepted by the Lincoln administration, still hopeful at that point for reconciliation with the slave states.

However, by the end of May the situation was very different. Confederate forces had attacked Fort Sumter on April 12 and forced its surrender. In response, Lincoln called for volunteers to restore federal authority in the South. Lincoln’s actions led four of the remaining eight slaves in the Union to secede, including Virginia. On the same day the three slaves appeared at Fortress Monroe, May 23, the Commonwealth’s voters had ratified secession.

In this atmosphere of uncertainty, Benjamin Butler had to decide what action to take. His hand was forced by the arrival of a Confederate officer at Fortress Monroe under flag of truce demanding the slaves return. Adam Goodheart relates the encounter between Butler and the Virginian, Major John Baytop Cary.

If anyone was qualified to devise, on short notice, a solid justification to hold slaves who had escaped Confederate custody, it was Benjamin Butler. A crafty litigator and politician from Massachusetts, Butler was a recently commissioned Major General who owed his appointment to Lincoln’s desire to solidify the support of Democrats like him that favored military action against the South. Butler would prove a dismal battlefield commander, but in this incident showed him to be a gifted administrator.

By declaring the three slaves “contraband of war,” Benjamin Butler did not challenge their status as property and by extension call into question of slavery’s legality. At this stage of the conflict, most political leaders in the North were eager to depict the developing conflict merely as a rebellion against legitimate government authority which had nothing to do with slavery. However, officers on the ground like Butler quickly realized the slaves were a significant military asset to the Confederacy, acting not only as laborers, teamsters, and in other support roles for the army, but also by keeping southern agriculture functioning allowing a much larger portion of the white male population to be available for military service than might otherwise have been the case. Hence, as property being used in support of a rebellion against the government, Butler’s “contraband of war” formulation legally justified the seizure of the slaves without immediately undermining their status as property. The Lincoln administration quickly acquiesced to Butler’s policy and Congress gave it the force of law in early August through the Confiscation Act of 1861.

What neither Butler nor leaders in Washington, D.C., reckoned on was the slaves’ response to his contraband policy. Soon other slaves began seeking sanctuary with Union forces, over 500 at Fortress Monroe alone by June 1861. The northern press soon dubbed these escaped slaves as “contraband,” a name initially resisted by some black leaders and abolitionists, but which even they eventually accepted.

But if the episode at Fortress Monroe demonstrated anything it was the fierce determination of the slaves to be free. A few slaves seeking sanctuary quickly became hundreds and then even more. As Adam Goodheart writes:

So the arrival of Union forces in a locality in the South, or even the prospect of their arrival, quickly began to undermine the institution of slavery, as slaves now had a place to escape from slavery with little fear of recapture. Yet without the initiative of the slaves this situation likely would have never arisen. Certainly, the slaves could not gain freedom on their own, but they determinedly pried at the tiniest fissure in the slave system made by the arrival of northern troops and the peculiar institution began to crumble under the weight of countless individual slaves fleeing it.

As Adam Goodheart relates, Lincoln administration policy about the contrabands quickly began to lag behind the reality on the ground. So much so, that the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which was announced in September 1862, in many ways was merely playing catch up. Goodheart ends his story with an anecdote that captures that situation well. He writes:

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com

3 Responses to Benjamin Butler and the Contrabands

I have a question about the first 3 contraband that arrived at Butler’s fort. Did you happen to pick up a name or names in your research? Did you find any information regarding what Butler was doing with the escaped contraband and whether he was “emancipating” them as Seward implies or putting them back to work as slaves, just for the Union’s benefit?

Their names were Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory. Butler did not want to return to the Confederates valuable property that would assist them in their war effort, and these three men had been helping to build rebel fortifications before their escape to Union. So Butler declared them “contraband of war,” which was a way to justify keeping them without challenging slavery’s legitimacy. However, as other slaves fled to the fort he was forced to consider the future of the people he was protecting. He wrote Lincoln and the War Department for guidance, and was told by Secretary of War Simon Cameron to keep the slaves, but also gather information on the slaves owners and the work they did, in case slaves of loyal owners were at the fort and their owners might need to be compensated in the future. At the time, Lincoln’s administration sidestepped the future status of the slaves as did Butler. But they would have to confront it eventually leading the Emancipation Proclamation.